GEN: Future of networking technologies for learning? (fwd)

[Mike Eisenberg <mike@ERICIR.SYR.EDU>]

You might want to check out the following and respond.  I think it would
be _great_ if they heard from a whole bunch of library media folks!

Mike
in Syracuse

      WHAT IS THE FUTURE of networking technologies for learning?
      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
      The Office of Educational Technology in the U.S. Department
      of Education wanted to find out, so it commissioned 14
      papers & hosted a workshop (in November) of Internet experts
      & teachers.  But we also want to hear from you.

           WHAT DO *YOU* THINK the future of networking technology
           will be?

      Please visit our Web site (http://www.ed.gov/Technology/
      Futures/), choose "Your Views," and answer that question.
      (About 100 words is probably the ideal length.)  But do it
      today, or at least by June 7 (all messages posted by June 7
      will appear on the Department's Web site).

      While you're there, you may want to read the workshop report
      & some of the papers...

           The Evolution of Learning Devices: Smart Objects,
           Information Infrastructures, and Shared Synthetic
           Environments (Chris Dede)

           Digital Technology and Its Impact on Education (Joseph
           Hardin & John Ziebarth)

           Building the Information Driveway: How to Make School
           Networking Universally Available (Robert Carlitz &
           Eugene Hastings)

           Connecting the Connectivity and the Component
           Revolutions to Deep Curriculum Reform (James J. Kaput &
           Jeremy Roschelle)

           The Whole World in Their Hands (Robert Tinker)

           The Internet and the Humanities: The Human Side of
           Networking (Margaret Riel)

           Weaving a Future for the Arts in Education through
           Technology (Scott Stoner & Janice Abrahams)

           Learner Contributions to Knowledge, Community, and
           Learning (Beverly Hunter & John Richards)

           Building Virtual Communities for Professional
           Development (Ferdi Serim)

           Renewing the Progressive Contract with Posterity: On
           the Social Construction of Digital Learning Communities
           (Robert McClintock)

           Digital Archives: Creating Effective Designs for
           Elementary and Secondary Educators (Margaret Honey &
           Jan Hawkins)

           Educational Publishing on the WWW: What's Happening
           Today and What May Happen in the Future (Susan Mernit)

           Copyright and K-12: Who Pays in the Network Era? (David
           Rothman)

           Issues and Needs in Evaluating the Educational Impact
           of the National Information Infrastructure (Robert
           Kozma & Edys Quellmalz)


*****************************************
EXCERPTS from abstracts of several papers
*****************************************
----------------------------------------------
The Whole World in Their Hands (Robert Tinker)
----------------------------------------------
Four major classes of networking use have the potential to
make a major impact on science education over the next decade:
resources, tools for inquiry, collaborative inquiry, and Net
courses.  This paper assumes that personal digital assistants
(PDAs) will become a popular class of computers for precollege
learners, and that configuring them as network clients will
become an important way to overcome their inherent limitations.
..
Collaborative inquiry will take many forms, from scientist-led
efforts like GLOBE, through student-led research.  Collaboration
will start in the classroom with students attacking different
parts of a problem and sharing their results over the network.
This will grow to include worldwide collaboration in communities
of student-researchers of great richness and variety.  Shared
instrumentation available only through networks--remote
telescopes, cameras on satellites, seismometers in schools,
automated weather stations, tunneling microscopes--will greatly
enrich the range of collaborations in which students can
participate.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Learner Contributions to Knowledge, Community, and Learning
(Beverly Hunter & John Richards)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Active construction of knowledge, participation in learning
collaboratives, and building on learners' interests and
experiences outside of school are major threads in educational
reform and new curriculum standards.  This paper provides
examples of student work that not only demonstrates their own
learning, but also makes a contribution to their community, to
the learning of others, and to the base of knowledge available on
the Internet.  We construct a brief vision of learning, teaching,
and knowledge-building in the future, assuming broad
participation in these activities.  We also identify some
developments in software and educational practice that are
necessary to help more students participate in and benefit from
these kinds of projects.

---------------------------------------------------------
Building Virtual Communities for Professional Development
(Ferdi Serim)
---------------------------------------------------------
Education reform and the integration of technology into learning
share a profound symbiosis: technology requires the rich learning
environments envisioned by reformers; reform demands the power of
technology to put people at the center of their own learning.
Systemic adoption of reform will take a critical mass of
educators, who must await the realization of the promises of
technology to transcend isolation and join in collaborative
professional growth.
..
While our search for models of the new practices and paradigms is
still in the discovery stage, we can find in the arts an example
that illuminates the types of changes that will be required, as
well as the unexpected means by which large-scale transformation
can occur.  These lessons emerge from comparing one of the
cultural high points of the industrial revolution (the emergence
of the symphony orchestra) with America's contribution to world
culture: jazz.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Digital Archives: Creating Effective Designs for Elementary and
Secondary Educators (Margaret Honey & Jan Hawkins)
---------------------------------------------------------------
This paper focuses on issues involved in making large, rich, and
complex data resources accessible to and interpretable by the K-
12 community.  It uses the American Museum of Natural History and
the Library of Congress projects as backdrops for thinking
through these issues.

-------------------------------------------------------------
Educational Publishing on the WWW: What's Happening Today and
What May Happen in the Future (Susan Mernit)
-------------------------------------------------------------
This white paper examines the near-term and long-term
implications for educational and mainstream publishers as the WWW
makes possible new types of content and new means of publishing,
distribution, and learning.  The ability for authors to create
their own content and publish themselves on the Web, and the
ability for publishers to update their content as well as to
package and distribute information in new ways, makes this an
exciting time to be in the publishing industry.  This paper
examines trends in the marketplace and forecasts where publishing
is going via the Web.

Appendix: The Rise of Publishing on the Internet: A History
     This appendix succinctly reviews the history of the Internet
as a mode for publishing.  It also defines some common terms
associated with publishing on the World Wide Web and explains in
brief how HyperText Mark-Up Language works.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright and K-12: Who Pays in the Network Era? (David Rothman)
----------------------------------------------------------------
American schools are typically spending less than three percent
of their budgets each year on textbooks and other copyrighted
works, and many teachers and students are either doing without
the material or pirating it. This paper examines the following
issues:

I.    What networks now mean to students and teachers--and
      copyright holders.
II.   How copyright laws, present and proposed, may affect K-12
      networking.
III.  Attitudes of educators and others toward copyright law.
IV.   Some possible options to help bring more copyrighted works
      to students while respecting copyright holders' rights. The
      ultimate solution may lie not in one scenario but in a
      combination of them.

------------------------------------------------------------
Issues and Needs in Evaluating the Educational Impact of the
National Information Infrastructure (Robert Kozma & Edys
Quellmalz)
------------------------------------------------------------
In this paper we discuss:
*     possible ways to tailor evaluation designs to fit the
      structure of the innovation and its causal proximity to
      student learning;
*     ways to assess the impact of the innovation on the structure
      of the education system--who will be included and involved
      in learning, teaching, and assessment and how existing roles
      and relationships might change;
*     ways to assess the impact of the innovation on educational
      processes and what potential technology has to capture and
      analyze these processes; and
*     ways to assess the impact of these innovations on a wide
      range of educational outcomes and performances, including
      the assessment of portfolios of electronic artifacts.






------------
Kirk Winters
Office of the Under Secretary
U.S. Department of Education
kwinters@inet.ed.gov